Vanquish Vps specials

Just wanted to let people know that we are running a deal where you can get a 20 man minecraft host for $15 a month.

When ordering use the code Lifer.

 Vanquish Vps

An awesome tutorial over xml in actionscript 3

I found an awesome tutorial over some real world usage of xml in as3 and I figured I'd share it out to everyone else. Check it out here

Minecraft hosting

A buddy of mine and I do Minecraft hosting on the side if anybody needs any check us out. Vanquish Vps

slow motion lightning

Saw this and I thought other people would like to see it as well.

Pretty cool robot

Check this out!

The easiest way I've found of embeding xml in flex

 I am messing around with flex using the flashdevelop ide (which you should check out) and everything in it works fairly well. Right up until I tried to embed an xml data sheet into my little application. Some googling revealed about half a dozen methods but most of them were kind of long or drawn out. Here is the absolute shortest method I've come across thus far. It's probably not the best way of doing it, but it seems to work. It consists of three lines and must be put inside of a parent class.

 The first and second lines really might as well be considered one line. The first line is the embed line that actually describes what kind of file you are trying to load and where it is. In my case I have a sub folder with xml data structures in it that I'd like to load. The first document I want to pull up is the items.xml structure. So inside of the class that I want to use my xml from I put the following lines.

[Embed(source = "data\\items.xml", mimeType = "application/octet-stream")]

This is the line that tells flex where the file is coming from and what kind of file it is. The "\" character can be used to escape characters. So in my case the "\\" is actually fed into flex as a single slash. If you put only a single slash the entire url of the file gets smashed together.

 public static const classitems:Class;

This is the second line, it must immediately follow the first line because the first line isn't a standalone command much like the [bindable] tag for variables. So whatever class you insert here will be the container for your xml document. In my case I chose 'classitems' because the actual reference I want to use in my program will be just plain items.

So now the xml document is loaded and assigned to a class inside of the application, but flex still doesn't know that it's actually an xml document because we are sort of sneaking it through the back door. So we need to feed the data into the xml structure.

public var items:XML = new XML(new playerstats.classitems);

This line feeds a real flex xml data structure with our piped in xml document and allows us full access to the xml document just like we had put it inline in our program. So now we can run normal calls against our external xml document, woo hoo!

trace(items.item[0].name);

I don't pretend that I came up with all of this on my own most of the information came from mattmakesgames.com All I did was try and clear up the explanations that I didn't understand in the beginning myself.

Sanctum - A beta preview

Today I'll be talking a little about my hands on experience with the beta of Sanctum from Coffee Stain Studios. (Steam $15 / 2 pack $25)

Sanctum is a sort of unique take on the tower defense genre. The game is played out entirely from the first person perspective and features co-op multi-player(a feature I wish more developers would embrace). The game is built on the unreal engine (presumably UDK) and so the first person controls and the net code provides a stable base around which the game is constructed.

The games graphics, while not mind blowing in this day and age, are sharp and professional. Animations are fluid and the creeps look great running through the maze. Audio and music while not exactly memorable are also professional in presentation and well mixed. The overall production value is quite high for an indie studio.

The game play area is split into three zones in the two maps available in the beta client and presumably in the rest of the levels. A spawn area that allows you to use your player weapons to plink at the creeps before they enter your maze. A player build-able area that is set up as a grid. Finally the core that you are attempting to defend which features a small killing field so that you can attempt to take out any stragglers before they reach it.

After each round (which had randomized mixes of creeps in the co-op games I played) you are given advance warning of what is coming next round and allowed to build additional towers.Resources seem to be round based increasing by a set quantity each round. There are more than a few creep types, many of which have very specific methods of being killed. Some have only one weak point, others can only be shot from behind, some resist small arms fire, and the list goes on. The list of build-able towers isn't as varied but has your standard mix of weak/fast and strong/slow towers, area effect towers, and anti-air towers. In addition to the towers and their upgrades (which are just a linear progression of strength) players can choose to spend their resources on their own weapons.

 

The player is a very critical part of the defense in Sanctum. The after action report indicated that our maze was only responsible for around 50% of the damage we dealt to the creeps. So the player can't sit back and let the maze do all of the work. Player weapons are upgradeable just like the towers are, featuring a linear progression of increased damage and a higher ammo capacity. Smart usage of the player weapons is definitely important. The weapons we had access to in the beta were an assault rifle, sniper rifle, and freeze gun. All of the feature alternate fire mode and it's the alt fire modes that become critical. The freeze gun's alt fire is especially powerful as it launches an area effect freeze that roots all the creeps in range for several seconds. Giving your partner and your towers extra time to chip away at their health. This makes for a nice combo with the assault rifles grenade alt fire.

The game came off as very polished and decently challenging for me and my friend (of course neither of us are what you call elite players). Never managing to make it more than a handful of rounds in before being overwhelmed. The game does have a few flies in the ointment. We had several crashes over the course of our three hour play session and at one point I lost the ability to move. If Coffee Stain manages to get the bugs ironed out over the three weeks until launch I would highly recommend Sanctum to anyone who enjoys tower defense games but is looking for a little more action in their diet.